Abu Dhabi: Artists are working at full speed to prepare their work for one of UAE’s biggest art and culture events, Abu Dhabi Art, which is set to run from November 16 to 19 at the capital’s Manarat Al Saadiyat, on Saadiyat Island.
Among the international artists who will be showcasing their work at the fair is one of UAE’s emerging contemporary artists, 29-year-old Zeyinab Al Hashemi who is working on two separate projects for the 2016 fair.
“As a young female emerging Emirati artist, I look forward to two main events every year, Abu Dhabi Art and Art Dubai,” said Al Hashemi.
Al Hashemi’s Camouflage piece in the 2015 Emirati Expressions exhibition, which was part of Abu Dhabi Art, was so well received by audiences and critics that she was almost immediately approached to collaborate with the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA Abu Dhabi) on another grand project which will be revealed during Abu Dhabi Art 2016.
Her project with TCA Abu Dhabi started about 10 months ago and has had her collaborating with “master-makers” based in Paris. However, she said she cannot give away too much as the project is a secret that will be revealed during Abu Dhabi Art. She says that we should expect an installation piece of some sort from her, on a grand scale.
She also pitched the idea of continuing the Camouflage piece as a series to Cuadro Fine Art Gallery, who loved the proposal so much they selected her to participate in Abu Dhabi Art 2016 with them.
Her original Camouflage piece used real camel leather and hair to form an enormous installation piece that people could sit on or touch, making it one of the most popular interactive pieces of the exhibition. It looked like a distorted camel from up-close and she reveals for the first time that it also looked a bit like a spaceship for a very deliberate reason.
“Because the camel in the Arabic culture is called the ship of the desert,” she explains.
“I try and push my work to be a public art so most probably it [her art] will be somewhere outside and not inside the fair… to be part of the space where people just walk by,” she said.
“What I like to do is to make sure people leave with an experience, for people to leave remembering something that was slightly different than usual,” she added.
Having developed a reputation for using craftsmen to build her installations, she said this piece will not be any different. This time she has selected a car workshop to collaborate with and said camel leather will definitely be involved again.
“For me people with hand skills are the ones I like to use.”
Although her participation in Emirati Expressions brought international attention to her work she laughs and said one of her favourite audiences was probably the children from school visits.
“They are used to being told to not touch the art so they were being very polite. I told some kids they were able to sit on the work…so they jumped on the piece,” she said. She said the fact that children could interact with her work was something that she really enjoyed watching as it provided the experience that she was hoping to create.
As she presses on with her work she said she hopes Camouflage Series 2, which started around six months ago, will be ready in October in time for the eighth edition of Abu Dhabi Art.
